Confessions Of An Ex Slimming Consultant

When I write this article I am referring to the dieting industry as a whole. As the article goes on, it will become apparent which particular slimming club I worked for, but I am not picking on them directly, they are just a single brick in a whole wall of misery.

My first dieting experience was actually quite late compared to other girls. My father insisted I was fat. I wasn’t. I was 19 at the time, an age where I should have been having a good time and partying.

My first attempt was fairly typical of that time. ‘Slimming’ Magazine was big in 1995. My best friend was also consuming 1000kcals a day, avoiding fat at all costs, eating Shapers ready meals and going to bed early because we couldn’t face living with the hunger. As a result of this, I associated slimness with hunger so when I discovered Food Optimising in 1999, I was excited to be able to stuff my face all day long. Looking back, it is very clear how my relationship with food became screwed up. Starve, binge, overeat, etc..

I became a consultant 11 years after starting my first ever diet, soon after the birth of my first child. I wanted to help people but also I thought that the role would help me maintain my weight, a thought that many consultants have when they sign up.

Whole packs of women, sitting together, feeling like a social club of failures, clueless to how they gained a pound, lost a pound, gained a pound. On and On.

Week after week we stood and applauded people for being successful and had to spend longer on people who had failed to get results. The questioning of these people was embarrassing and boring. I can only imagine what the new people thought sitting through a therapy session full of maintainers and gainers. Most of the time it was longer term members (and consultants) who were really struggling. Whole packs of women, sitting together, feeling like a social club of failures, clueless to how they gained a pound, lost a pound, gained a pound. On and On.

There are few things more humiliating than being weighed in public. I was taking people’s money and then asking them to get weighed. The members were always coming into group starving and dehydrated because they were terrified to eat or drink beforehand. Me included. One lady even took her jeans off in front of people. She had come to the decision that gaining a pound or two was more humiliating than standing naked in front of a group of people.

We had an award for people who had lost 10% of their body weight. We were not allowed to declare how much people actually weighed but it didn’t take much to work out how much someone weighed if they had just received their two stone award and their club 10 on the same night. We really were all treated like a room full of idiots.

Every week there would be a new recipe for a hideous sugar-free, fat free cake full of bran. Every month there would be a new ingenious way to spice up a pot of quark. Twice a year there would be a new limited edition of Muller Light yoghurt to leave a nasty taste in everyone’s mouth.

To get people to turn up we had to deliver 3000 leaflets to 3000 homes of normal families, poor unsuspecting people, many of which were probably already on diets or looking for that magical pill to make them happy. I found all elements of the marketing side quite depressing, but the one thing I totally refused to do was “word of mouth” marketing. I really hated that. We were expected to approach complete strangers and tell them about our group. I still pull a cringe face when I remember that.

I remember once at a regional consultant meeting, we were asked to stand up if we were at target ourselves. Only one person out of a hundred stood up.

I struggled with my weight throughout my journey as a consultant, because it all comes down to the same thing. We were all struggling with the same guilt, the same misery, the same feeling of hopelessness as all the members. My own consultant at the group I attended as a member was also struggling. She had gained 4 stone since hitting target herself and just couldn’t get motivated from one week to the next. Bless her. She is still a consultant now. I haven’t seen her in years, and the sad truth is, there is a good chance she is still struggling to accept herself and still feels she just needs to “get a grip”. It’s heart breaking. I feel sorry for the consultants at the other big slimming company. They were forced to get on the scales at regular intervals, and asked to lose weight if they were not proving to be a worthy example.

I remember once at a regional consultant meeting, we were asked to stand up if we were at target ourselves. Only one person out of a hundred stood up. I still don’t know if it was an exercise in humiliation or some other point, but it spoke volumes to me. Living on extra lean mince, fat free cottage cheese and Quorn mince was miserable, unsustainable and humiliating. The saddest thing about that day was that every other woman in the room was most likely telling themselves to just get a grip, and they would be a success too.

In the space of three and half years I went from feeling genuinely ecstatic about helping people to feeling utterly deflated when I realised I was just compounding their problem and not helping at all.

I discovered the Beyond Chocolate approach a few months before leaving my role as Chief Soul Destroyer. I cannot even begin to explain the numbness I felt turning up at group every week once my fire had gone out. I started seeing every new member walking through the door as victims instead of members. They were looking at me with desperation in their eyes and instead of being excited to help, I just wanted to cry.

I am also one of those victims. Despite really thinking I was cured, I have just completed another cycle of diet/binge/diet, finally waking up on Monday 23rd Jan 2017, utterly ready to finally end the 22 years of feeling a totally fat, useless failure. Having to listen to my opinionated, skinny mother in law hasn’t helped, but at some point I need to stop blaming others and take responsibility for my own happiness.

I feel sick every time I see women piling Muller lights in their shopping trolleys

In reality the plan was just really difficult to follow for most people. Every group had their shining examples. A small handful (5%) that were happy to follow it. They either genuinely loved tasteless food or were just so incredibly brain-washed that they just followed it, year in and out. We, of course, made a big deal of these rare specimens and used them to inspire the other members and ourselves.

My guilt has worsened recently as more and more evidence emerges about the health benefits of real butter and proper food with natural fat in it. I feel sick every time I see women piling Muller lights in their shopping trolleys and I can hear their bodies screaming out for something that is natural and not just a complete chemical shit storm. I contributed to the brainwashing and I am working on forgiving myself for taking part in an industry I now despise.

I have finally flashed the “Stop” sign in front of my eyes and have signed the pledge to quit the madness. I am taking care of myself and my family and finally can say that I will never diet again.

Thank you so much for posting your story. I have been a member of that same slimming club on and off for well over 10 years. 10 plus years of an emotional rollercoaster – feeling over the moon with a pound or two weight lost then beating myself up for those same pounds gained. Inevitably I am more than 3 stone heavier than I was the first time I joined.
A few months ago a friend of mine became a consultant and I volunteered to be part of the ‘social team’. Like you, I thought helping other people with the plan would reinforce my own commitment and keep me on track. How wrong I was! I simply cannot stick to the plan in any way, shape or form! My body or brain or both just will not let me. The more I tell myself I must pull my socks up and get on with it, the more my overeating and bingeing has escalated.

I’ve explored the “no diet” approach before but have always been too terrified to fully embrace it. I thought I would be giving up on my dreams of a “normal” body and “healthy” weight. Now, out of desperation I find myself here and deeply relieved to read about your experience. I felt like a mad person when all around me seemed to be able to make the plan work for them. I felt like such a fraud wearing that t shirt when every week I either maintained or worse still gained weight. My friend was on the verge of asking me to stop going to group ( I still feel hurt by that) but I decided for myself to give it up.
Not because I wanted to find a new way to lose weight but because I desperately wanted to stop the madness. I recognised the ridiculous cycle I was in – diet,binge, diet, binge. I was terrified to diet but terrified to stop trying to diet. Now all I want is to feel in control around food and have a healthy relationship with food and my body. I feel confident I’ve come to the right place.

Thank you for this. I am also an ex-consultant and totally, utterly echo your sentiments. I couldn’t stand the scan bran, “tweaking” recipes, “cheating and giving in” any longer. I felt sick of low fat, artificial sugar, clapping like seals and just wasting so much time and effort on something that really wasn’t working. Even for the people it worked for – some of my members lost 5 stone, but if I see them now I can see that like me, they have struggled since. It’s heartbreaking. I stopped running my class for many, many reasons, but despite feeling attached to all the people, it felt like a (no pun intended) weight off my shoulders when I finally quit. I couldn’t wait to get away from anything with the logo on, I still hate seeing it now, several years on. I turned my head away from any and all diets, but it has taken me until the past year to find BC, and now I finally feel like I can actually pull out all the mess inside my head, make sense of it, appreciate myself and appreciate food. Thank you for sharing your story xx

Thank you for posting this, it is nice to see the opinion of consultants. I am new here and am jumping on the NO DIET band wagon because after years of dieting I feel that it has just completely damaged my relationship with food. I was brainwashed by the other big diet company, as i never enjoyed the food on the the one you were with. With a lot of weight to lose, I could just not fill up on it, I felt like I was eating rabbit food and running on empty all the time. I think with both clubs though you get brainwashed. They don’t teach you anything about nutrition and portion sizes. It is so hard to let go, and I am just taking the first steps this week. I am just angry at myself for all the money and time I wasted on them over the years just to end up heavier, and feeling like a failure. Thank you for sharing this xx

Hi all. I wanted to add my comments to this. I joined SW only very recently and have no idea why! I have been aware of BC for a very long time but never fully embraced it.
Everything you described was so very true. I gave it a go for less than a day. Tried a
carbonara sauce with Quark and boy was it disgusting.
Although I spent £10 on joining I’m not looking at it as a waste or the time spent in the class. This has really propelled me to start to fully embrace BC and for that I’m thankful.
Jo

I’m also here because of a last ditch attempt at SW. The fact they change a vowel from ‘sin’ to ‘syn’ doesn’t fool anyone – you’re still calling certain foods sinful. I only stayed to one class (because new members weren’t weighed until the bitter end) and found the clapping like seals utterly exhausting and frankly repugnant. Slimmer of the effing Week and Month?!!! How crap does that make you feel when you’ve done everything 100% right but your postmenopausal body refuses to shift weight anything other than slowly? How can it help to make us compete with each other in that way? I did lose nine pounds, but it just felt so WRONG. Last night I genuinely forgot to go to class (Freudian slip or what?!) as I was out doing something far more interesting, but as soon as I came home I signed up for BC. I’m done with diets.

Brilliant article. I’m almost crying reading it, but laughing at the same time, recalling many of my own sessions as a SW member. Thank you. I’m a new member of BC, not quite knowing how it is going to go for me, feeling my way around via a few posts, and thankfully, am already feeling I’m in like-minded company. Early days.
Oh, God, Slimming World – why did I try so many times to make it work??!!

Thanks for sharing your experience, it did make me smile in places! I successfully kidded myself as a member for some months that the recipes were quite tasty initially, but could never do the artifical sweetner route and often questioned how healthy the spray fat was. One of the saddest things that I heard as a member was hearing another member saying that the previous way that the diet had worked, with the red and green days worked for her, but the new one didn’t, in that moment I wondered why on earth wasn’t she listening to herself and just do the original plan. That I thought was incredibly sad that she’d tuned out so much. I used elements of their plan and did find it started to help me attain a bit more balance in my eating than I had previously (unsustainable low carbs and cravings), but I combined their plan with a more intuitive approach and then realised that I couldn’t do the ‘back on plan’ every monday anymore when I’d gone off plan on the weekend. I’ve found that the ‘allowing’ approach of BC and mindful eating has lessened the excesses and helped me to balance my eating out throughout the week.

I’ve just come out of SW and into BC. I’m thoroughly embracing the BC approach and benefitting from it. However, I’m a bit shocked by the venemous anti-diet tone I’ve seen in blog posts. Personally I’m still grateful to my SW consultant and am fond of her and others in my group who helped me to lose weight when I couldn’t manage it on my own. As I see it the problem is that the slimming groups never deal with the psychological factors. They DO try to encourage being kind and non-judgmental to yourself; to eat mindfully; to control portion sizes; to monitor and stop eating when full etc. etc. but they never really give you the tools to do this. These are the things I’m hoping to learn.